Buffalo Police Memos Reveal Crime Reporting Schemes

Toward the end of today’s print column, we noted the Tolbert campaign’s sharing with AV some memos written for Buffalo police about incident reporting policies that seem intended to reduce the number of crimes the BPD must report to the FBI for the purpose of determining the city’s overall crime rate.

Here are those memos:

BufChester

Actually the second memo seems to show that crimes (attempted rape and negligent homicide) are being up-classified to more serious categories, which completely undercuts the premise of the story.

The insistence on specific things being counted (or not) as felony assaults seems to make sense and certainly doesn’t seem to be something that “Brian” had discretion over. If someone a bullet has to hit someone to make it a felony then it either is a felony or it’s not. I’m sure those parameters are established by the FBI. If detectives are classifying things incorrectly then it makes sense to correct them.